Internet

Publishing SEO articles in your website is a matter of knowing how and where exactly in your website – how it can be read by web crawlers properly and where it can be discovered faster when search engines do a research for a certain keyword. Different articles published in the same website will not be discovered at the same rate even if they share the same keywords because other factors in search engine optimization affect discovery and ranking, such as link, URL structure, alt attribute, length and meta tags. You have to consider all of these factors if you want to maximize your online visibility.

When publishing SEO articles, do you publish the whole content directly on your home page (which is the case for most blogs) or do you just give a preview in the home page and let the readers decide whether to continue reading in the main article page using an anchor text or menu? Is there a difference?

Yes, there is – a huge difference. Using article preview to force the readers into visiting the main article page increases the conversion rate of PPC advertisements and affiliate links, but at the same time, it also increases bounce rate, or the rate at which readers stop navigating and leave a page without visiting other linked-to pages. The worst part is that publishing an SEO article in a different folder or submenu also changes the URL structure, placing the page title farther from the domain name.

This change badly affects website discoverability because web crawlers tend to read keywords in the title page much better if they are closer to the root domain. Although there are ways to manipulate URL structuring, the most practical way is to simply publish the SEO article to your home page like how most blogging platforms do it. Hence, not publishing the entire article on your home page will benefit your profit but will somehow affect your click-through rate because of lower page rank.

Another issue when publishing an online article is whether to use submenus to distinguish contents by more specific categories or not. For articles that follow the same format (e.g. blog entries, reviews, testimonies, etc.), it is advised that you just publish them without categorization because it will just affect your relevance rating determined by search engine algorithms.

Linking is another factor to closely look at when publishing SEO articles. Linked-to pages tend to rank higher than those that are not linked to by other pages within or outside your website. Before you publish your SEO article, make sure that all relevant anchor texts are used. Linked-to pages should also be updated by placing reciprocating anchor texts.

Another way to improve the discoverability of your SEO article is by finding the right media – pictures or videos – that clearly represent what the article is all about. The alt attributes should properly correspond to your main keywords, so that they can also be indexed properly by search engines. By doing so, you practically qualify your article for two types of online searches – web page and media – which also increases your chance of being ranked.

Length is also a consideration before publishing an SEO article because relevance rating is somehow affected by the extent of information contained in the article. Basically, the more relevant information you have in it, the higher ranking it can get. Needless to say, you have to write somewhat longer to attain a decent amount of relative information.

Lastly, meta tags like meta description and meta keywords should be prepared before the publication. On most blogging platforms, meta tags are required before publication to improve the discoverability of a page. You have to pick the right way to describe your article in a single line because internet users will see it in the SERP once they do a research.